In the early weeks of this newsletter, I want to make sure people understand the story that led to writing my book. At the end of each newsletter, I will reference specific, relevant issues from the book and, when relevant, connect them to current events.
In his book, Black in White Space, Elijah Anderson powerfully demonstrates how Blacks must learn to navigate White space in our society, whereas Whites hardly ever enter Black space. [You can find his book here.]
His book has made me reflect on my time in the 1980s (and into the 1990s), when I spent almost my waking hours surrounded by White people.
While at Simsbury High (1975-1979), I actively sought out friendships with the three young men from ABC entering their sophomore year at the same time I did. Once I left high school, though, I studied, lived, and worked in one White space after another for nearly a decade, with little to no interaction with African Americans at all.
How did this happen?
In the fall of 1979, I enrolled at Clark University in Worcester, MA.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but in guessing, there were probably, on average, no more than 25-30 African American students throughout my four years at Clark. I was friendly with a few guys, mainly through intramural basketball, but most of my interactions remained superficial my entire time there. As might be expected, most Black students stayed in their tight social circle, given that Clark was mainly a White space. Although I loved my college experience, it is one of my sole regrets during that time not to have befriended any of the African Americans on campus.
When I moved to Worcester, the city was completing its third decade of significant population loss. It had never recovered from losing most of its manufacturing base from 1950-1980. Clark resided in one of many declining neighborhoods—South Main—in the city.
In 1980, Worcester was one of the few majority-White cities in the Northeast, hovering around 90%; the Black population did not reach 5%, in part because the core of Worcester’s Black neighborhoods were demolished in the 1960s—like so many were in the 1950s to 1970s—to allow for the construction of I-290. Even today, Worcester is majority-White at 67%; the Black population has risen to about 13%.
By my second year at Clark, I realized while volunteering for the Big Brother/Big Sister program that most of the city's lower-income households were White. Having grown up in an upper-middle-class White suburb, it had never dawned on me until then that White people could be poor. Until then, my exposure to cities had been very limited. I lived 12 miles from Hartford; my grandparents lived in Brooklyn until the late 1960s. Thus, until then, my stereotype was that poor people were Black—or, in some neighborhoods in Hartford, Puerto Rican. My prejudice at that point shows, to a degree, how powerful mainstream media was in the 1960s and 1970s—feeding the stereotype of poor equaling Black people.
All my summer jobs during college, I only worked for White bosses and with White staff, both in Simsbury and Worcester. After my sophomore year, my father linked me with a unique summer jobs program sponsored by Hartford’s Department of Transportation. In a city with so many Black youth needing jobs more than I did, the department hired three suburban White kids for the program instead. I was one of those three.
This incident with the city’s DOT was a perfect example of White leaders privileging White young adults to the exclusion of Black adults. Without a doubt, this type of discrimination happened in summer jobs programs across the country at the time.
After I dropped out of a Ph.D. program in meteorology at Oregon State University in early 1985 – where the only diversity across the faculty, staff, and graduate students was a student from Peru and two from Sri Lanka – I landed a summer job some months later at The Omega Institute, a holistic retreat and education center in Rhinebeck, New York. No one from the full-time and summertime staff was a person of color. Nearly all the faculty were White; I can’t remember seeing a single Black attendee (although there may have been a few) that entire summer.
In 1986, I fully committed to my anti-nuclear activism and joined a large-scale Great Peace March, in which 450 people (more at the beginning and the end) walked from California through the Southwest, Great Plains, and the Midwest to New York City and concluding in Washington, DC to protest the nuclear arms race. Out of the 450 marchers, only five were Black (for those doing the math, that is 1.1%). A dozen or so marchers from Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Germany, and Mexico served as the primary diversity on the march.
In 1987 and 1988, I served as a regional organizer for International Peace Walk, Inc., where we organized three American-Soviet Peace Walks in Russia, Ukraine, and America. Each time, 200 Americans and 200 Soviets walked and camped together for five weeks. On those walks, a single African American and a single Native American participated out of more than 500 Americans across the two years.
You’re getting a clearer picture of how pervasive my White spaces were in the 1980s.
When I moved to D.C. in the summer of 1988, my first job was as a temp at the National Science Teachers Association. I noticed that the only Black program assistant, a woman in her thirties, was deferential in everything she said and did around Whites, almost as if she was playing a maid role in The Help. It was painful to watch, and I couldn’t help believing that her behavior was taught to her while growing up, to be largely subordinate and less visible in White spaces.
In my second temp job, which lasted through 1989, I actually had a Black boss, a middle manager at the National Academy of Engineering. In my nine months there, I saw no other mid-level or higher-level Black manager. All other Blacks worked there either as secretarial or janitorial staff. Mind you, this was 25 years after the Civil Rights Act passed.
I then spent three and a half years in a support role and then a publications manager at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in downtown D.C. Not a single Black faculty member taught there. All the Black employees were staff level. All the janitorial staff were Latino. Out of a student body of several hundred, there were less than a dozen Black students. SAIS, however, was the first time in more than a decade that I became friends with African Americans – both on staff and those studying in the program.
For middle-class Whites of my era, I doubt that my young adult, almost universally White experience was that unusual. We grew up and were socialized into a system that centered Whiteness.
Where Whites dominated.
Where Whites were amost universally in leadership and managerial positions.
Although that’s changed somewhat in the ensuing decades for middle-class Whites because nearly three-quarters of Whites self-segregate in their own neighborhoods and only 1 percent of Whites have an African American in their friend circle (yes, that’s what research shows), has it really changed that much for most White people?
In fact, in my postgraduate jobs from the early 1990s through 2013 (a national association, two boutique consulting firms, and a national non-profit), all of the organizations I worked for—and most of those I worked with—had the same dynamic: high-majority White staff, almost always White-led, and African Americans in mid-level jobs and, more often (with Latinos), in more subordinate or support positions.
You can find an excellent data summary of “The Black experience at work in charts,” (McKinsey & Co.) at this The Black experience
Two stats that I find stunning—and have haunted me since I learned of them during my research for the book—are as follows:
Black adults are paid significantly less than White adults at every education level, from those who lack of a high school diploma all the way to those who hold an advanced degree - and every level in between. At each level, on average, Blacks are paid 20-30% lower than Whites. Don’t believe me? Check this out from 2016 (it hasn’t changed much since then) from the Economic Policy Institute.
The Black unemployment rate has been double the White rate for 60 years. Through much of those six decades that meant that the level of Black unemployment stood at recession levels but never were there any significant interventions to attempt to remedy this. Let’s be real: if and when White unemployment rates are at recession levels, it is an economic crisis. Do youwant to see evidence? ABC News.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump has recently told several audiences that immigrants are coming into the country and “happen to be taking Black jobs.”
This statement is wrong on so many levels, even as the former president has tried to explain what he really meant when grilled about it at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week.
The implication seemed clear when he originally said it: it seems his view is that most Black people hold jobs at the low end of the jobs ladders, and therefore, those are the jobs that immigrants have taken away. If we had had a huge infusion of immigrants six decades ago, that might have been true back then (we didn’t), but it is certainly not true anymore.
We can find many African Americans working in middle and upper management (and, less often, in the C-Suite) across most industries. Many new immigrants take jobs that most Americans (White or Black) don’t even vie for. Trump’s intent seemed like an attempt to attract Black voters (in a back-handed way). However, to many, it harkened back to the subtle insults and slights that too many politicians utilize—and have utilized historically—to stereotype African Americans.
I hope we don’t hear messages like this in the last 80 days of the campaign, but I fear we will.
Images courtesy of Chat GPG 4.0